Born in Chicago, I have loved books since childhood. I’d borrow them from the public library on Wednesdays, then on Saturdays ride my bike to the bookmobile to return them and check out more but never imagined being a writer; I wanted to play second base for the White Sox. When I chose what to study in college, my father wondered, “What’s to study? You already speak English.” Our relationship appears in some of my short stories. In high school and college I was a gymnast—later the setting of two more stories—until winning the college short story-writing contest which significantly shifted my primary focus.
Dropping out of college, I moved to New York’s Lower East Side in 1976 before ever learning my grandparents had once lived only blocks away, which strengthened my sense I’d really come home. My railroad apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen had a water closet with “the chain thing” like the one behind which Clemenza taped the gun for Michael in The Godfather. For the next twenty years I was a gymnastics coach, personal fitness trainer, waiter, construction worker, bike messenger, and truck driver, then eventually returned to college and earned a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois—my dissertation on the New York School of Poets and Painters. For thirty years I’ve taught college English and now New York Studies at St. John’s University. I begin writing early in the mornings for as long as I can with a fountain pen in a marble composition notebook before typing a copy of it, and until writing my historical-memoir Central Park Love Song had never heard of Audrey Munson—the central character in my novel Miss Manhattan—despite seeing statues all over town for which she posed. There will always be plenty to write, new works and those unfinished, but there’s never enough time.